IRAN International Public Health Summer School (IPHS)

An on-site Educational Game on Global Health for Health Professions Students

IRAN International Public Health Summer School (IPHS)

An on-site Educational Game on Global Health for Health Professions Students

What is IPHS?

Games can make considerable changes in the learning environment of the learners and are becoming increasingly popular in health professions education. However, more insight into their design features and effectiveness is needed. This study describes several aspects of organizing of IPHS as an on-site educational game.

IPHS is a 7-day long on-site game in which participants in the role of health specialists, try to promote the health status of their own community by doing ten missions. Each mission contains game play(s) that simulate different aspects of public health specialists’ tasks. Some examples of the missions are Advocacy of the authorities to start their activity in the community, investigate and control an outbreak and write a policy brief.

Despite the considerable amount of time and energy on designing and holding IPHS, the participants’ satisfaction and attachment to it motivated us to hold IPHS for 5 years. But, the last IPHS held in August 2017.

IPHS background

The story of IPHS goes back to 2013. At that time we began to wonder why the health professions students don’t have an interest in public health education and don’t enter this field, for either learning or further activities. Actually, we thought that Public Health is a very attractive field, then why there’s no motivation for it?

To answer this question, we decided to design and hold an educational course to face and assess the students’ needs directly. And as a result, we got a precious experience! We noticed that students are actually runaways of lectures of theoretical basics and in contrast, eager and ready to participate in practical activities to learn skills. Indeed, THEY WANTED TO PLAY GAMES!